


Hellfire, Spitfire and the Fantasy of Choice

by not_whelmed_yet



Series: Doubly Blessed and Doubly Cursed [2]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Abduction, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Asexual Space Robots, Bittersweet, Flashbacks, Gen, Kidnapping, Linguistics, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Psychological Torture, Starvation, circa mtmte #33
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-23
Updated: 2017-06-23
Packaged: 2018-11-18 03:12:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11282604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/not_whelmed_yet/pseuds/not_whelmed_yet
Summary: This is a story that takes place in the same continuity as Seeing Double. However, all youneedto know from that is that Rewind doesn't get away from the DJD and is taken as a trophy. This is what happens next. Also delves a sliver of my interpretation of Rewind's life pre-Dominus, which is also pretty dark.





	Hellfire, Spitfire and the Fantasy of Choice

"Your toy threw it's leg at me," Kaon complained, holding up the leg. It had barely scuffed him. His silhouette cast a spiny shouldered shadow against the projection, cutting through the shaking image of Domey's lifeless body. They'd locked his neck joint that morning to stop him from turning the picture to face the wall, but the shaking wasn't even an act of resistance. Apparently it was his body's natural reaction to terror. How convenient for him that it served his purposes of also making _them_ miserable.

Just like his leg. It was their fault for detaching the things and then leaving them within reaching distance. He'd pulled the other one close, ready to throw it at whoever next tried to touch him. Probably that awful little medic again. He shuddered and the video on the projection spluttered to a halt. It stayed black for a moment and then looped back to the beginning of the footage, Overlord's execution.

Tarn looked over at Kaon with narrowed eyes. "Are you frightened of the thing?"

"It's a nuisance. We should take the arms off, stop it from bothering us. It's much better now with the vocalizer cut off."

Rewind clicked irritably, "You are all dead." The odds of them ever having learned clickspeak were slim, but at least he still had the satisfaction. To punctuate the statement, he spelled out the threat again in sign language and then with several vulgar gestures he had stored in his database.

"It is a bit...feisty still," Tarn admitted. "Ask Nickel about cutting down on it's fuel, see if that quiets it."

"The projector's an auxiliary system, it'll cut out if we cut its rations much more," Kaon said.

"Mm, not if Nickel goes in and links it up with the emergency response circuitry. It's a fairly simple medical override. Like we did with Nimbus so he could enjoy more of his time in Helex's smelter without offlining himself."

"Ah, yes. That was enjoyable," Kaon agreed. Behind them, Pipes' paint bubbled and peeled, hands desperately trying to hold his spark in his chest despite the gaping hole. The image shook and shuddered.

Tarn walked over to Rewind and knelt, staring at him, head cocked. Rewind kept his grip on the leg. "Little thing," Tarn said, "you are comforted by the thought of resisting us. But the more you resist, the more pieces of you we will take away. Eventually you will only be the projector and your video and the silent scream you cannot voice. And what will be the point of resisting then?"

He got up and walked away. "Comm Nickel," he said over his shoulder. "She can do that coding before we hit the planet."

  

* * *

 

He wasn't sure what was going wrong, but there was something about the Energon that was making him sick. He'd been subsisting on the meager rations they gave out at the relief center for two stellar cycles, after he lost his position doing data entry to a new wave of Functionist propaganda. It wasn't enough, but it had been better than nothing. Now it hurt, an all around ache through his cabling but centered at his fuel pump, like something was clamping it tighter and tighter and the liquid couldn't compress. He found himself passing cycles counting kliks, trying to distract himself from the pain and then from the hunger when the pain was so bad he couldn't get up to get his ration for the day.

Disposables weren't allowed at the community clinic anymore. And even if they were, he had no Shanix to ply a medic with.

"You need a placement," one of his neighbors clicked at him. He had a weird dialect of clickspeak, this mech. He was one of the laser pointers and he'd come from somewhere far away, some patron who'd traveled from...maybe Tetrahex. Rewind couldn't remember anymore. Maybe his memory was corrupting.

"I am no slave," he said.

"Soon you won't be," the neighbor said. "Soon you'll be dead."

"Better to die free," Rewind said.

"You are stupid," he said back. "This can not last. When change comes, you will be dead and we will be free."

It took two of them to carry him to the Functionist center, where he waited eighteen cycles for an especially down on his luck patron to select him from the pens. He spent the next 67 stellar cycles in solitude, processing and storing astronomy datafiles. But that first fueling on real, uncut energon was like a taste of the afterspark. Sure, it was low grade and barely filtered, but it wasn't like it took much energy to sit in the dark and think. He composed poetry for a few stellar cycles, then switched to translating the classics from memory into clickspeak. First his own dialect and then what he could remember of that Tetrahexian laser pointer. When he tired of that, he started reanalyzing the starmaps he received for his own entertainment. The constellations became a tiny army of angry memory sticks surrounding the Functionist Council, bludgeoning them to death. He named each one. It was better than death, he supposed. He was pretty sure. He was nearly certain.

His next patron nearly _had_ an army of memory sticks all his own, a cohort of seven. He worked in Iacon's local government and used them to file and access court records. The work was worse, more files about death, petty crime, addicts and abuse. But he got to walk again. There was a click in his left knee he didn't remember from before his first placement, but he couldn't be sure it hadn't started up earlier. He hadn't been very coherent those last months.

The luxury of that patron was the company. The Functionists had apparently completely brainwashed everyone into believing that the 'lower classes' could barely follow simple instructions, let alone be capable of mutual communication. They seemed to think the chatter of his coworkers was babble.

Which is what it was for Rewind for the first few deca-cycles. Clickspeak had changed while he'd been locked up playing with linguistics and they chittered in amusement at his odd turns of phrase. But before long he adapted and they were all on speaking terms.

"Allergy," Frame diagnosed. "You were allergic to crude Energon. They started using crude instead of processed at the relief centers right about that time."

"I'm allergic to it too," Buffer said. "Pretty common for our frametype, actually. Three of my old cohort were allergic."

"It's good you came in when you did," Frame said. "Even if you could have lasted through it, they closed the relief centers to 'disposables' not long after that. That's when I finally broke."

"I lasted another seven stellar cycles," Flicker said, adding a dismissive trill at the end. Rewind had been telling them about how his old Tetrahexian neighbor used to do that. He was never sure if it was only him or an actual dialect, but it had certainly become part of the cohort's pattern of speech. "Had a friend who was conscripted into mining and he shared rations with me until they reassigned him off-planet."

"A moment for the helpers whose fate we'll never know," Index said softly. They all looked over. Index had been selected the same time Rewind had, but had adapted to speaking far slower. He'd been given an assignment at the beginning of the Functionist upswell and had been alone storing financial records in a closet somewhere until the landlord who'd been his patron had finally gone bankrupt. Even Rewind's old clickspeak had been virtually unintelligible for Index at first.

"We are in darkness but may they have light," Rewind said. They all echoed him and cut their optics for a klik in respect. Then they jumped back to work before someone could notice. Rewind had never heard any of the six acts of gratitude before coming there, but he was learning their import to his new friends. It wasn't religious, but it made them feel less small and their suffering not just theirs but part of a community's.

Those stellar-cycles had been his happiest years until Dominus recognized his worth. He sometimes turned them over in his head, let the memory's now well-rounded corners comfort him with it's familiarity. None of that cohort had survived the war. Almost none of his frametype had survived the war and the bad years that lead up to it. But their deaths were familiar. Given long enough anything could become familiar and comforting. He turned those memories over and then he let the images projected on the wall wash over him, blunting the edges a little bit at a time.

 

* * *

 

The creature they called a sparkeater was nothing of the sort. He looked a lot like a turbofox, but some of the details didn't quite match up. Too much ruff around the neck. Rewind had seen the thing attempt to eat his friends' dead bodies and the first time it tried to lay down beside him he flinched away. It flinched back and ducked it's head down, scurrying off to some other corner of the ship.

When it tried again, Rewind was already delirious with hunger and lack of recharge. He'd never seen them feed the pet, he realized. Was it was only permitted to drink from their kills? If so, it would be even hungrier than him. There was no one in the lounge to watch the eternal feed at that moment, so he worked up the effort to click at it. "Maybe what you are is not your fault," he said. "Maybe you are good." It looked at him with enormous eyes and circled closer before curling up, nestled by the socket for his left leg. It was warm. "You are good," he said, experimentally. "I forgive you."

It hummed in pleasure, sending vibrations up through his frame.

If they hadn't taken his arms he'd have been tempted to pet the thing, maybe groom the spines of its coat into order. As it was, he drifted on the heady daze of too little sleep and the vibrations rumbling through his body. At some point he'd grown so weak that consciousness no longer felt real. It made the forgiving easier. "You are good," he said again. "You deserve better than this."

**Author's Note:**

> I'm over on tumblr at [ notwhelmedyet](http://notwhelmedyet.tumblr.com/), having mtmte feelings and very slowly rereading. I am overjoyed by any comments up to and including incoherent keyboard smashing, y'all. If you have critical comments/corrections, send 'em my way, I want this story to be the best it can be.


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